


A Shadow In the Museum

by tangentti



Category: Hannibal (TV), NCIS, Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 00:21:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17735459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tangentti/pseuds/tangentti
Summary: Will Graham finds his ability to visualize the past through empathy haunted by a woman in blue.  Sapphire and Steel hunt a killer who is mixing old and new.





	A Shadow In the Museum

_All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension._  
  
Will hardly felt the cold, wrapped in the layers of cloth and identity that made his design.  His new gray coat armored him, against the cold, against the pity of men, an announcement of control and status, quiet and confident.  Within that, the glory of the persona Hannibal had carefully insinuated into him, the pieces of a shattered man built into a nacent demigod, felt the cold not as discomfort but as a tool alone, a context to be exploited at need.  And within that shell, pulling on it with the gentlest of tugs, Will himself rode, an angler patiently waiting for to the bait to be taken.  But until that time, he must yield to the current and be the entity he seemed to be.  
The snow dazzled by day, cluttered with the technicians moving back and forth placing their little yellow flags, trying to quantify and control the chaos time had left of the murders.  Numbers and photos tumbling and saturating the scene, two bodies, separated by flight, and a third whose gravity had pulled them from their lives to a final collision.  “He’s escalating,” Jack said, himself a cool center of mass, pulling all these lives to focus on this place.  The tone of voice carefully ambiguous, asking the unspoken question of who exactly ‘he’ would be.  “No,” Will said in quiet tones, pitched to carry only to Jack, “he’s becoming.”    
There was enough data poured in through the gates of his senses, filling his gift with the qualia needed to reconstruct the patterns, the intent that structured the world.  He raised a hand, waving Jack away, and closed his eyes.  Humans, no longer entities that the being Will had been shaped into considered itself, could be best described as hallucinating their model of the world and revising it, instant by instant to accord with their senses and forgetting the revision.  To stand outside was to know the model as a thing in itself, and change it at need.  The most terrible thing about Hannibal was that his therapy worked, building a more effective Will.    
Here he stood, a god in a small world, and began his work, not of creation but of recreation.  Systematically, right to left, left to right, as inexorable as time passing, he swept the environment of details, turning time backwards, effects reducing to their causes.  The technicians vanish early, effects of the crime, unaffected by the details of the design.  Jack lingers for a moment, and himself is erased, nowhere near the scene when it happens.  The clutter of footprints, gone, save for the line of the walker who discovered the bodies.  The ashes of the fire, blazing up into light again as the sky darkened to night.  The killer had candled it, built a lure to draw in and blind the prey.  Here, he had stood, veiled in darkness in the shelter of the trees, a man holding a beast on a leash.    
Will conjured his beast, the black-feathered stag, and considered, feeling the mass and warmth of the animal.  It was too large, unconcealable, not intimate enough for the design of the killer.  Not a man holding a beast, but one on the line between beast and god who had become a beast.  Will melted into the identity, a hunter waiting for his victims.    
There, they came, lightly drunk, attracted to the light, the male and female of the species.  Here, they paused, feeling the warmth, looking into the fire, and then, he strikes, bounding out of cover, invisible to his prey.  The male, sensing the attack, pushes the female away, but falls to his worrying jaws ripping flesh as he is borne to the ground.  The woman rabbits, the scent of fear drifting behind her as she sees the glints of my teeth, claws, hears the death of her mate.  She is caught, the monster in the darkness moving faster than should be possible, running for her life beaten by the treachery of snow and night.  It’s not a hunger for her, it’s just hunger for proof, validation that the beast is the real person and the man is an illusion.  She sees the beast and finds it real.    
Will stands again, and looks from the bloody white furs that remain shrouding the victim, no longer of interest now that she is no longer moving, and looks back at the fire.  The man isn’t moving, he was ripped limb from limb by the monstrous power, but there’s something incorrect in this picture, an extra piece that doesn’t belong to this jigsaw.  Two pieces, a tall blonde woman, staring at Will in the darkness with glittering blue eyes, a compact man with fair hair, looking down at the man’s body.  They look like angels, slumming, as though the horrors of the murder were of little concern, but are more interested in what Will is doing here standing in the killer’s shoes.    
He opens his eyes and looks, seeing them there, as though they had sprung into existence when he closed his eyes.  Will is still standing by Jack, all as it was, but the woman wrapped in her blue overcoat is still looking at where the killer was, where Will thought himself to be, before she shifts her gaze back to meet his, and twitches her mouth into a broad smile.  “Jack,” he says slowly, with unfeigned puzzlement, “who are those people?”  
It’s as though a spell were broken, Jack woken from distraction and dreams, he strides like a moving stone, direct and unstoppable.  “Who are you and what are you doing at my crime scene?”  It’s a growl of authority, a challenge.  Will moves in the shadow of the stone, faintly behind.    
There’s a chill, a mirror of the perfect courtesy Hannibal affects, as the woman suddenly thaws, face animating broadly, a hand extended, as though this was any social occasion, meeting for high tea or a murder, all one.  Will thinks there’s a brief dazzle of sunlight caught reflecting in her eyes as the angles change, the briefest of pauses before a cultured voice says, “Ellie S. Bishop, NCIS.  My friends call me Sapphire, and this is our crime scene as well.”  
“We’ll see about  that,” Jack asserts, and then presses, “And your friend?”  
“Fellow operator,” she says, “Dr. Donald Mallard.”  An odd glint of mischief touches her lips.  “His friends call him Ducky.”     
The man in question straightens up, glowering at the interruption.  “Sapphire, is this necessary?”   His affect is flat, completely unaffected by Jack’s menace or her joke.  He’s far gone on some spectrum of isolation, but Will finds it impossible to diagnose.  Even his words indicate a complete indifference to the people around him, save for his partner.  
“Sapphire and Ducky?”  Jack says, mirroring her mischief, a move to diplomacy, and a prod.  
“Steel,” the man snaps, and steps away to look at another patch of disturbed snow, running a hand in slow tracks just above it, dismissing the conversation as unimportant.  
Will steps in, “Your fellow operator,” he says, echoing her words, “doesn’t seem interested in small talk.  What did you mean, your crime scene?”  
“Steel,” she says, “doesn’t even know what small talk is.  The nuances of human interaction,” and Will most certainly catches the stress, “often pass him by when he’s concentrating.”  Her eyes twitch, glancing briefly up at the sky, and again there’s a momentary glint of light, “The female victim, Marta Coelho, is an engineer for the navy.  She’s on a list which gets flagged if there’s a suspicious death, and this is most certainly a set of unusual circumstances.”  
“Well,” Jack says, full on faux affably, “I know how those lists work.  You’ll have to sign in and show ID so the control of the crime scene is established for the record, but I’m certain this is our case.”  It’s a nice challenge disguised as a favorable instruction.  
“Of course, Director Crawford, anything to make our cooperation run smoothly.”  She’s as smooth as glass, completely unfazed by the requirements.  
“I didn’t introduce myself,” Jack growls,”why are you really here?”    
She steps closer, for just an instant, and it’s clear just how tall she is when she looks down at the two of them, “It isn’t hard to recognize you, Jack Crawford, nor your shadow Will Graham, from the photos in the media.  You’ll understand I can’t talk about some aspects of our case as they intersect with yours, but I have no desire or mandate to interfere with whatever investigation you are running.”  Her face falls back into the smile, “You’ll have what you need, and we’ll have our access, and everyone will be happy to find out that we never need to see each other again.”  And she turns and stalks away, heading directly for the control officer.  
“That,” Will says to interrupt Jack, “was a very strange conversation.”    
“They’re not NCIS,” is the response, “word choice is all wrong.  You tell me if they’re involved.”  
“Not in our investigation,” he paused a moment to stress which investigation he was was thinking of, “but they seem very interested in the killer and much less interested in the victims.”  Will thought again about the woman, Sapphire, and the way she drew attention like a magnet, all surface charm.  “Operators, I’ll give you.”  
  
Tier had lied with unusual skill, Will thought.  Knew the jargon and routine, as though coached.  But he couldn’t shake the illusion of legitimacy, not without more evidence than intuition.  Here, in the museum of natural history, he could step into the environment where Randall worked, fill his mind with the bones and depth of history and prehistoric death.    
How did Tier walk these halls?  Smooth soles on his shoes, a padding tread of a predator.  Will stepped lightly, reflections off of dark stone floors tracing his path.  A human figure, suddenly flushed into motion, wide eyes with fear, dampened surprise when Will passed her.  Staff, a woman, moving bones.  He didn’t stalk women, or men, but only prey mattered, victims.    
A brief sound, a grunt of breath, a drift of wind caused him to freeze.  What did Tier encounter here in these halls?  Will closed his eyes, erased the present and stepped into another mans memories, and opened them in another time.  
No museum at all, snow, drifting over ragged tufts of grass, the skeleton of the great beast clothed in flesh and fur, a mammoth caught mid-step, ears spread wide.  The walls of coarse fur twitched, the raised leg slowly fell to a gentle crunch.  There was danger here, the wind blowing the musk of the creature to Will and beyond him.  Predators approach upwind, but something had alerted the prey.  It turned its massive skull, an eye coming into view, fixing on Will’s gaze, and suddenly he felt the cold of a subarctic winter.  
_< Doctor Graham, do not turn around!>_  The voice was crisp, commanding, entirely in his head, and belonged to the woman in blue.  Why was he thinking about her?  
_> What are you trying to tell me?<_  The inner voice was easy, a childhood trick he had forgotten.  Was she standing behind him or before him?  If this was his empathy feeding a message, why couldn’t he see her as he had before?  
_< Will, you must believe that none of what you see is real.  Do not interact with anything.>_  It was an odd phrasing, of course none of this was occurring outside his head.  He couldn’t be hurt, any more than falling in dreams would kill him.  But the cold felt very vivid, and the hairs on the back of his neck were rising.  
_> Did Tier believe this was real?  What happens if he, if I, want this expanse, this powerful creature, more than my polished halls?<_  The mammoth tilted its head, its one visible eye clearly focused past Will, enormous padded feet tensing against the ground.  Was the wind swirling behind him, a bump in the ground changing the note it sang?  
_< Doctor Graham, you must understand the concept of a psychotic break involves the loss of central coherence, fragments of thought apparently real.>_  
_> Like voices from inside my head?<_  
_< Exactly so.  Modeling a mind outside standard consciousness involves revoking conscious privileges to the unconscious.>_  Her voice was strained, with a note of lying under the stress.  _< Steel?>_  he heard, like she was speaking past him.  
Why would he be lying to himself through the medium of Sapphire?  And where was Tier in this vision?  
_> I know psychotic breaks, I’ve had enough of them.  This doesn’t feel like one.<_    
_< Distract him,>_ the male voice said, <I’ve almost got it.>  
_< Imagine,>_ Sapphire said, the low hum of a turning engine behind her words, _< Time is like snow falling on a frozen river, each moment a single snowflake, unreal until it hits another moment.  Each moment of the present pressed down upon the past, building weight compressing all the instants that have gone before until the history becomes solid like ice.  Not everything is fixed until it becomes the future.>_  
_> And what, I’ve fallen through the ice into the river and been swept away?<_  
_< No, Doctor Graham, you cannot believe that.  It’s an analogy, for the flash ontology, the accumulation of causets, basic physics that everyone knows.> _ Steel, breaking in, voice too calm, disguising effort.  
_> Everyone knows?<_  What were they distracting him from?  Will broke free from the spell, turned to look behind him and saw: here and now, the back of a gray-suited man, hand placed on the skull of a skeleton, all vicious teeth, bones wired in a menacing leap.  Walls suddenly around him, floor replacing snow.  
“Doctor Mallard?”  He spoke out loud, the trick of inwards speech having vanished with the dream.  
“They were wonderful beasts, the unquestioned masters of the subarctic terrain.  Tracking herds, waiting for a straggler or stray, I would watch them for hours on assignment.”    
“You would watch them?”    
Sapphire’s voice, from close behind.  “He spent a lot of time in the north, trying to find frozen mammoths.”  Had she been standing in front of him during his reverie?  
Will stepped back, bringing both of them into view, suddenly feeling like the creature in his vision, meeting a strange being he had never seen before.  Sapphire, stepping close to Steel, too close for strangers, professionals, but not lovers,  Steel, merely turning from his skeletal friend, no give in his stance indicating a tie to Graham at all, as thoughtless as any autist.  For a brief moment, he thought that there hadn’t been an exhibit there at all where Steel now stood.  
“I was lost in thought, I didn’t see you arrive.”  
The bright white of her smile, all surface, “I noticed.  You were rapt.”  
“Was Randall Tier caught in the same rapture?  Did he fall through the ice?”  
Sapphire’s gaze flickered left, a moment of silent communion with Steel, Will could feel the unspoken words, if not sense them.  Steel disagreeing, wanting to use him in some way, Sapphire deflecting, wanting to push him away.  “You’re the profiler, Doctor Graham.  It’s outside the scope of my professional opinions.”  
“What is in scope for your professional opinions?  Flash ontology?”  Will stepped closer, looking up into her blue eyes.  
“You are very intuitive.  Let me simply say that you won’t find much on that subject on the internet, for excellent reasons.  But my professional opinions run more to investigation of anomalies surrounding security related deaths.”  Deflecting, no information readable from her microexpressions.    
“My professional opinions suggest these are aethestic killings, a signature I’ve seen a lot over the last year.  Nothing to do with security.”  What would Hannibal do?  “In 1346, the Beast of Gevaudan stalked medieval France, killing those it caught alone at night.  This was one of the original werewolf events, a man who identified so strongly with a predator he acted as one.  How much more powerful are the stories we tell of the beasts of the past now?  What mantle of bone does the current killer wear to fit into his myth?”  
Steel smiled at Will, an oddly terrifying event.  “Not bone, Doctor Graham.  Steel.  He’s built a puppet to wear, a ritual mask to raise the dead.  Not so different from the Gevaudan creature.”  The words had a peculiar stress, personal experience instead of indirect data.  
Will flashed a controlled smile, channeling Hannibal’s affect.  “I know how to catch a puppet.  Snag one of the strings.”  
  
Will heard the bark, and moved before thought.  One of his dogs, his familly was endangered.  The snow hadn’t been that thick before, pulling at his feet as he ran towards the lure, putting himself into the frame of the victim.  If Tier was far enough gone, would his beast recognize the weapon?  He scooped up the bleeding puppy and scanned the darkness.  Was it here?  The air smelled colder, foreign, fresh.  The lights of his house, his territory were still on, there the creature would be waiting.    
Time wasn’t behaving normally, an eternal, endless run and then suddenly he was inside with no memory of the transition.  Lights off, to better wait for the Tier-creature, intuition and empathy supplying the answer to how it knew where he lived: Hannibal.  Eyes on the door, he backed away to control the space for an attack, when the beast blindsided him through the window, suddenly there, moving faster than any human attacker.  Will lay, dying, cold lacing through his bones as blood escaped his body.  Darkness, but he didn’t need eyes to see the ravenstag acting through the creature.    
In the corner, blue eyes, glowing from within, and a rhythmic pattern, as though an engine underlying reality was turning over.  Just Will, and the woman Sapphire, and darkness.  “Will, the paratypical extension that is patterning the event stream is cutting causal links.  Steel and I cannot reach you.”  Behind her, shadows in white, great beasts of snow, Steel with a hand out, a cold wind dripping from him, air turned to liquid.  “Not physically.  Not while you are alive.”  
“Dead men can’t think, can’t hear.  I’m not dead.”  
“Remember the falling snow?  You are dead, shortly in your future, but it’s not solidified yet.  I need you to step back, into just a few moments ago.  Borrow my eyes, see the direction the past lies in, and this will all be your gift.”  Will reached, let his mind slip past the theory of humanity covering the being before him in lies, and for an instant was outside everything, a fish seeing water for the first time.  
Time wasn’t behaving normally, an eternal, endless run, and then suddenly he was inside, slapping the light off, putting the dog down in a safe corner.  Eyes on the door, he backed away, his skin crawling with the sensation of the beast approaching the windows, the creaking of the snow, the shifting of the shadows shouting its existence.  If he looked, the beast wouldn’t spring, if the beast didn’t spring, he couldn’t kill Tier, and if he didn’t kill Tier, he couldn’t reel in Hannibal.  Shattering glass, but he was already turning, raising the gun, setting the hook.  He saw the ravenstag, but the body turned into a young man, locked into an absurd harness of steel.    
  
—-  
“You are Doctor Mallard?”  Jack stared at the old man, then looked at Will as though he could resolve the puzzle, see the motive for age having struck, or that Will could pull the mask away from the person’s face.  
The face pulled into a warm, human smile, “Doctor Mallard is who I am at work, call me Ducky.”  The bones were the same, and the eyes, but this was a person, all the way down, and not whatever the Steel being was when it wasn’t pretending to be a human.  
“Do you have a son who also works for the government?”  Jack couldn’t be told, couldn’t know.  UFOs seemed more believable than agents from outside the river of time.  
“You met my doppelganger?  I get that a lot.  It was really bad when I was in med school, there was this woman who was persuaded I was an international spy.  Swore I was running around Europe having wild adventures.”  He was starting to ramble.  
“No, much younger than you.  Using your name.  Pretending to be a government agent.”  
“Was there a woman with this man?”  Will could see the jump as well as Jack could.  The man was suddenly focused.  
“You tell me,” Jack said, “I want to hear this.”  
“It was 1980, and I met a young man who called me Steel, out of nowhere, and asked about Sapphire.  Told me a ghost story about an isolated house with nursery rhymes and a missing sister.  In the tale as he told it, real men-in-black oddness, I was there, wearing gray, not black, and a woman in blue.  Do you have a ghost story to tell me too?”  
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Jack said, “but I do believe that impersonation of federal agents is a crime, as is conspiracy.”  
“You’re welcome to arrest this man if you find him, but I keep being told these ghost stories by strangers, so I believe in one particular ghost at least.  Keeps life interesting.”    
  



End file.
